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teeks99 writes "Even NASA could benefit from the 'Launch Often' idea that is frequently referred to in the software development community. However, in NASA's case, the 'launch' is a bit more literal. Edward Lu, writing in the New York Times, points out that by lowering the consequences of launch failure, and making frequent launches available to engineers, NASA could open up a new wave of innovation in space exploration. If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many opportunities for new ideas to be tried out in communications, remote sensing, orbital debris mitigation, robotic exploration, and even in developing technology for human spaceflight. Another benefit would be that the rockets would be well understood, which would improve reliability."

I mean, your'r a silicon valley startup, you launch a POS software that crashes, you redo it, no blood no foul; the only problem is some pissed off customers, but hey - it's software, we expect it to not work on ver1.0 (or ver10,0 if your are MS)
Just like putting 100,000 gallons of toxic explosive up into the air - the consequences of failure due to rapid product cycle are just the same.

The fact of the matter is they need more launches to maintain interest in the public sector so we might get a budget that actually allows things to get done. Of course they need a more efficient launch system, something that diverting 20-30% of the defense budget unto NASA could accomplish.

Thats insightful? Claiming a company with 2, low payload, orbital launches and a lot of explosions is better than NASA simply because its a corporation rather than a government agency? The fact this comment didn't get modded down to oblivion shows there is quite a lot of blind ideology on/.

NASA has phenomenal quality control, your comparison is apples to oranges. My knowledge is outdated, but I read Feynman's report on Nasa's quality control after the Challenger disaster, and I hope they got their act together after that. Quality control was huge then, in volume and procedure, but that doesn't mean it had any value. The software department was good, I recall that much.

Yup - I've seen this far too often in areas like aerospace and medical devices. Quality Control becomes less about making products that work and more about writing lots of documents saying that the products work.

Don't get me wrong - process control is a big part of ensuring quality. However, good paperwork is not the same as good quality, and I think that a lot of box-checker types miss that. It is far more important to understand your product and how it is made, so that you can spend your quality dollar

The exhaust from APCP solid rocket motors contain mostly water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen chloride, and a metal oxide. The hydrogen chloride can easily dissociate into water and create corrosive hydrochloric acid, damaging launch equipment and biasing the pH of local water and rainfall.

I don't know were you come from, but were i come from, hydrochloric acid and acid rain are bad.

The rockets are well understood. The Atlas/Delta/Centaurs are all 45 year old designs and well shook down and understood. Even the "new" rocket is 85% old Space Shuttle booster, 30 yr old design.The Saturn V was considered well understood and capable of being "man-rated" after six launches. So this rationale does not hold water.

You might look for other motivations, like maybe huge profits for the rocket makers and launchers?

Thanks for saving me from saying it. This Soyuz envy is absurd. The Russians were marooned aboard Mir when we started flying shuttles to it. Without the shuttle we couldn't have an ISS, the the foreigners love so much. Soyuz is a step 50 years back. Let NASA build the Ares 1 and 5!

The first Soyuz flight was in 1966. The first Shuttle flight was in 1982. So its 16 years, not 50.

Just because something is newer does not mean it is better for all cases, or will keep being better. When was the last time you saw a plane with variable-sweep [wikipedia.org] wings? Or hydroplanes for that matter.

Large R&D costs, very tight regulations, conservative customers. More than one launch company has failed because it could not secure a launch site. More than one launch company has failed because prospective clients vanished.

It was non-US projects mostly which had problems getting a launch site: e.g. OTRAG, Aurora. In order to not have this problem Sea Launch used a mobile sea platform for rocket launch.

I do know SpaceX considered it enough of a problem that they preferred having multiple launch sites (Kawelejian, Omelek, Vandenberg). AFAIK they were all but kicked out from Vandenberg, allegedly because authorities were concerned an exploding Falcon 1 would drop on top of the Atlas V launch pad. Had they not those extra launc

The rockets are well understood. The Atlas/Delta/Centaurs are all 45 year old designs and well shook down and understood. Even the "new" rocket is 85% old Space Shuttle booster, 30 yr old design.

A lot of old aerospace tech is effectively lost to time because:1. The dies/molds were destroyed2. The blueprints were tossed out3. The institutional knowledge of the workforce is gone

Modern "heavy" lift rockets can boost about 22%~24% of the Saturn V's capacity.We're lucky enough to have the Saturn V's blueprints still around,but without the other two things I've listed, it'd cost billions to ressurect.

If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many opportunities for new ideas to be tried out in communications, remote sensing, orbital debris mitigation, robotic exploration, and even in developing technology for human spaceflight.

And, with all of those extra launches, there will be extra debris to attempt those orbital debris mitigation techniques on! It's win/win!

We have a shuttle launch every few months, and every time the general public's reaction is almost total apathy. Satellites are launched into space all the time, and nobody cares.

We don't need more frequent launches, we need a manned space program that actually makes progress if we want people to get excited about space travel. Sending tiny robots into space is not interesting to most people, and sending people to the same rock over and over again is also not exciting to most people (witness the rapid dropoff in interest during the Apollo era).

The way to get national interest in space travel up again is twofold:
1. Get NASA going full-bore on manned exploration of space. Put the Mars mission on an Apollo-like timetable. Of course, no one wants to spend the money for this because nobody cares about space, so we have to use the next point to get them there:
2. Aggressively support commercial manned space travel. Give more people a chance to go into space, even just LEO, and you'll have a lot more willingness to fund aggressive exploration missions. This means the price for a trip has to go way down, and the safety has to go way up. If we can get to a point where a trip to space costs the same as, say, an all-inclusive vacation to the Caribbean, everyone will want to go.

The current strategy of announcing big initiatives and then starving them of funds, and letting commercial space ventures limp along with inadequate funding and no direction, is not getting anybody anywhere. As long as NASA is saying 20 years just to get back to the Moon (assuming the funding isn't cut, which it always is), and it still costs $20 million to get a private citizen into LEO, interest in space travel will remain low. Launching more rockets filled with tiny robots is not going to fix that.

Okay, and now I notice the article is actually about solving scientific problems, not generating interest. Of course, without public interest, there's no way in the world NASA would ever get enough funding to do anywhere near that many launches, so the point still stands.

I can't help by be reminded of an article from just a couple of days ago [slashdot.org] about a similar mindset. One could argue that if you spend decades and decades with your focus being "generating public interest" in a program without finding a way to make it profitable or solve some genuine pressing outstanding problems, it will become harder and harder to justify spending tens of billions of dollars each year. Eventually, you're just stalling.

I suspect that until we find a way to make this whole exercise profitabl

We have a shuttle launch every few months, and every time the general public's reaction is almost total apathy. Satellites are launched into space all the time, and nobody cares.

Cruise ships depart US ports almost daily, airliners depart from where in the US every second, rail cars by the thousands are in motion day in and day out - and nobody cares. It's all routine. If space travel and access is all routine, then that's usually considered a sign of maturity.

We don't need more frequent launches, we need a manned space program that actually makes progress if we want people to get excited about space travel.

You state that as if not being able to make progress without getting people excited was a fact, as opposed to the opinion it actually is. Research ships leave US ports routinely, and there are probably a thousand or more science teams in the field in the US at any given time. (Well, maybe not this week with the holidays and all.) All of this happens almost completely without public notice, and the lack of such notice impedes progress not at all. (And that doesn't even touch on the [probably] tens of thousands of lab bench bound research projects or researchers toiling away in libraries and archives.)

Which is a long winded way of saying that before you propose expensive stunts to draw public interest, first justify your claim that without interest progress won't occur.

Progress requires funding. Funding requires public interest. Public interest can be generated using the methods I spoke of in my original post.

Sure, eventually progress will occur using our current methods, but it will take forever. The only way to get the funding to generate progress in a desirable time period (say, fast enough for me to vacation on Mars before I die) is to spend more money, which won't happen until it becomes politically popular to do so.

You can't get this kind of funding through just "public interest." Funding for space travel requires the prospect of a profitable return. That is how cruise ship travel matured, this is how air travel matured, and it will be how space travel matures if it ever does.

Agreed. There seems to be a lot of talk about getting people into space for the sake of getting them into space. Why send them in the first place?

For those who suggest that space is the ticket to avoiding overpopulation on earth - I remain skeptical (at least not until technology improves GREATLY). The costs of supporting people in space are massive. If you look at where most of the population growth is happening it is in underdeveloped nations - do you think that a bunch of childless rich guys in the w

The earth can support, indefinitely, a population which continues to grow at an incredible rate and which shows no signs of slowing down?

You should read about current projections of future population. The worst case remain exponential growth, but the expected case is a population peak around 2050 with population decline after that point.

I agree that we need to generate public interest, but I disagree on your methods. So instead of sending robots, we send people. To what affect? Who cares?

Look back at the great space race of the 60s. What made it as special as it was? Was it that we were flying men in to space with little more than tin foil and duct tape? Or was it that we were actually in a race? We had to beat the commies! I don't really know why it really mattered, but it was a national pride thing so I guess tangible results wer

We have to send people to explore places we haven't been already. Like I said, nobody cares about people going to places we've already been (the moon), and nobody cares about sending tiny robots to explore for us. Sending people to explore is exciting, though.

Of course, there's also a groundswell of feeling in this country that government shouldn't do anything at all, and certainly shouldn't spend any money; and private enterprise doesn't care about space outside of orbiting the Earth with satellites,

We don't need to "get people excited", they just need to pay for launches.

Since a manned program is not a matter of need, send probes, perfect robots, and concentrate on science instead of the wasteful drama involved in manned travel. Men will go into space wether or not the US sends them, and there is no reason we cannot mooch off the progress of others instead of pissing away money in what is a hangover of Cold War rivalry.

Space is a hostile place, and an expensive place to send humans, so why should we n

We don't need more frequent launches, we need a manned space program that actually makes progress

To the contrary, we need more frequent launches because this is the great unexploited economy of scale in space flight. If you want a program that "actually makes progress", then it needs cheaper space launch.

Yes, it's good to have people care about NASA so that maybe Congress will actually fund them, and not just keep shoving pork on them.

However, the need for more launches is to be able to do science. Yes, the launches themselves can be exciting, but you could put on a fireworks display for a lot less money.

And NASA can't set their priorities and timetables when they have no control over their budget. I have no idea just how many projects got cut when the whole 'go back to the moon' thing happened, but I kno

Really, I wouldn't call NASA now "successful", if it wasn't for NASA having a nearly unlimited budget to compete with the USSR, they wouldn't have achieved much. I'd say "unlimited money in the hands of a simi-competent organization can let you do great things". Lets see what state NASA is at in 2009. They currently don't have a way to send things into space on their own, having abandoned the older designs and won't have Ares done till at least 2014. The Space Shuttle was more or less a disaster having lo

They currently don't have a way to send things into space on their own, having abandoned the older designs and won't have Ares done till at least 2014.

Just to be clear: There are several launch systems capable of sending "things" into space, just not people. Things like Mars rovers and probes to other planets and comets don't use man-rated launchers.

More frequent launches, cheaper better faster, reusable, and more reliable would be a nice place to get to. And it seems like it is being tried at NASA. The space shuttle was supposed to be something that launched frequently. The mars missions were cheaper better faster. Both showed NASA was not quite there yet.

NASA is not going to the be the guys for quick jaunts into space. For that to happen, the west is going to have to have a much higher tolerance to exploding spacecraft, and the economics is going to have to allow for profitable ventures to succeed even when the launch vehicle fails and the company gets sued because someone was woken up by the explosion.

Three other lessons learned from software development. One,doing more increase communications costs, and those communications costs can overwhelm a management structure. NASA does pretty ok with communications as launching a space craft requires a lot of high quality communication. Two, there is no silver bullet.Real problems are really hard to fix, and most of the time requires a novel solution, not just doing more of the same. Three, system can quickly become complex enough so that no one fully understand what is happening.Our machines do grow more complex and sometimes we don't know exactly what is happening.

Then, again, there is the issue of launch vehicles exploding in space. When google mail goes down, as it does, people are annoyed. When a launch vehicle does down, as happened two years ago with Sea Launch,the communication payload, launch platform, pretty everything goes kaput.

Speaking of Sea Lauch, I wonder if we don't have a launch a week from the various people who do this. Such a distributed system might be better as it prevent one company, such as google, from being the absolute arbiter or what is a good idea and what is a bad idea.

The best papers I've ever read on this subject were Jerry Pournelle's Getting To Space [jerrypournelle.com] and The SSX Concept [jerrypournelle.com]. Basically he makes a simlar argument in the context of SSTO. The problem with the way we do space right now is it's just too expensive to do anything useful. Things we could do like space-based solar power and asteroid mining are now totally impractical because it costs, what, $20k to put a kilogram in orbit? As long as that's the case we're pretty much stuck with LEO vanity projects. We can't even afford to go back to the moon.

Getting the $/kg to LEO down should be the single-minded thrust of the US space program in the coming years.

If we built and launched just one Super Orion we would never have to send anything but people into space again. And if we sent enough people up, that wouldn't be a requirement so much as a nice-to-have. Launching 3 million tons of cargo anywhere in the solar system would instantly create a space-based production capability and we'd never have to look back.

I second this, I've seen a few presentations about the Orion technology, and its just so simple, I don't see why it can't be used, aside I mean from backwards fears of nuclear power. Of course there's danger involved, there's danger with everything, but that's what careful engineering is for. This is a massive ship you're talking about building, there's no excuse for it not to have the absolute best safety features, and if it does, and if our 60-70 years of applied nuclear research has been worth anything

I don't want to sound negative, but until we have a single stage ground to orbit reusable vehicle, this probably won't happen. The shuttle had the right general idea, but failed for numerous reasons and it also was not a single stage ground to orbit vehicle. One of those issues was the re-entry, which damaged the heat shield tiles requiring a large number of man hours to inspect and replace, and another was that it took for ever to get readied again for launch. There are technologies being researched that w

SSTO is basically a dead issue. Nobody has figured out how to build one. It may not even be feasible to build such a thing. Having worked in the field I can tell you one thing, its JUST barely possible to hurl stuff into orbit at all. The engineering is a nightmare. We aren't even close to anything like SSTO and its not even clear that if you could build such a thing it would be cheaper than disposable rockets.

The best idea anyone has come up with yet that is provably viable is essentially what the Russians

SSTO isn't dead, its just resting. Basically, its been figured out that you need to get at least some of your oxyidiser from the atmosphere to give you a mass fraction that doesn't require fantasy engineering. Skylon is a promising project along these lines, but is at a very early stage of development. The company behind it just got a million euros or so to work on the engines that it will use. In a sane world they should be getting a billion (their engineering pedigree justifies that level of confidence IM

If I had to guess I'd say Skylon will probably fail. Your right, its the only viable approach in the long run, and they may well be able to produce an operational vehicle. The trick will be to make an operational vehicle that is cheap, safe, and reliable. I think basically its one of those "pick 2 of the these three" situations.

The fundamental problem with ALL rockets is you're operating at the very most hairy edge of what is possible. Everything has to be feather light, withstand huge aerodynamic stresses,

This sounds quite nice, but consider the costs. According to NASA, each Space Shuttle launch costs an average of $450 million. Doing one each week would amount to approximately $24 billion per year in costs. This would be similar to the per-year project cost of the Apollo program. If we are going to spend that much, shouldn't we go to Mars or something rather than just throwing up a bunch of rockets?

Anyhow, given the debt that the US is currently putting itself into, it seems to me like it would be a much b

Doing one each week would amount to approximately $24 billion per year in costs.

And it would put about 1500 tons into orbit every year. Rather more than four times the current mass of the ISS.

Let's see. What could we do with that much mass in Earth orbit. Besides make the ISS about five times its current size, of course. Since most of our plans for Mars missions envision about 800 tons in orbit to send the mission off, we can do that. And an asteroid mission, of course, since that's easier than the Ma

But we can at least speculate on a realistic plan for frequent launches:

1. Adopting a limited number of launch vehicle types. Atlas, Titan, Delta, Ares or whatever it becomes, and maybe a commercial design or two in there, but probably just one. The Virgin/Scaled Composites projects are out of scope for this, let them do their own thing.

2. After certifying new designs and man-rating them, we move from testing to 'production'.

3. Ramp up launches so that you are probably only launching every 3-5 weeks realistically.

4. Allow for more launches when needed.

5. Multiple pads are in use. Currently, pads 36A&B, 39A&B, 40, and 46 are active, 37 and 41 are under construction for Ares (probably) and Delta IV respectively. So we could have 2-3 pads for big lifts, and 3-4 pads for utility launches. This makes some 3-8 week turnarounds practical, and some shorter.

6. Some rockets have different prep times. I suspect the goal of the Ares-type launch vehicle is to get it into a rapid cycle, but I dunno if Atlas, Atlas-Centaur, and Delta can be prepped that quickly. However, if you tell them you need 15 Delta launches a year, I be they can do it.

7. Now to get some payload for these. Certainly, sending a new set of Mars Rovers up would be cheapo science. I bet the guys at ASU could have them ready in a year. How about sending a set of them to a Saturn moon? Need bigger panels of course, and improved radios, but maybe send a Surveyor-style satellite up there also as a multipurpose mapper and relay? More solar expeditions? Venus has been neglected. replacement and maybe even return and refurbishing of some communications birds? There are plenty of projects.

8. Benefits; Regular routine launching gets everyone in the mode of a business-as-usual launch team. Practice makes perfect. Small problems should be detected and resolved. Obviously big problems get attention and maybe even a stand-down to work the problem. A multitude of small payloads spreads the potential loss, though in some cases I bet the vehicle is more expensive than the payload, if small science is a goal. And, and, maybe there builds pressure for more reusable vehicles. Routine launching makes the ISS easier to maintain, in a way, if you have regular smaller deliveries. Losing one doesn't hurt so much, and repairs can be done faster. Faster crew exchanges might be useful, especially if you just send a specialist up for a 3-week project, knowing they will be able to go back up in 6 months. You can work to improve experiments in a way you can't much do now with the expense and time needed to send up crew and equipment.

Can we hope there is some economy of scale? I'm not sure how important that is, since I think NASA should be getting a LOT more money, but I'm a space wonk.

Then again, maybe Rutan and Branson team up and make a servicable small payload launch version of the White Knight, and we get competition.

Thinking this through, NASA could probably do a lot of launches with not too much problem. And we could build or rebuild a few pads...

You may not be a rocket scientist, but I am, so let me clarify a few things here.

You seem to be confusing ULA and NASA launch efforts here. The Atlas V and Delta IV EELVs are commercial designs. Titan is retired, never to be launched again, and the future (and ultimate feasibility) of Ares I or V remains uncertain. Also, under point 6, Atlas and Atlas-Centaur are the same thing. Atlas refers to the first stage booster and Centaur is the second stage.

The shuttle's systems can launch as rapidly as 24 times a year. The hangup of launch times is the shuttle itself. The original plan was for an assembly-line setup, but the refurbishment of the shuttles turned out to be too time consuming. A disposable system utilizing the STS system, like the DIRECT or the original ESAS Ares V, could be flown at 18-24 times a year using the existing system, simply due to the most time consuming piece of the puzzle, the shuttle, being taken out of the picture. The Ares V

Can we afford such massive expenditures of energy on such a frequent basis? And for how long? Is this limitless or what? I mean, I love sci-fi too but unfortunately have become aware of the fact that resources are not limitless....

A lot of the costs of maintaining the launch system go by the day and hour anyway, not per launch.

Sure, you could put it like that. You're pretending like electricity is limitless, though. Which is only one of the flaws of your post.

The efficiency of the electrolysis process is high, but it's not 100%. (This PDF [bellona.org] puts efficiency of most economically viable methods around 80%.) Taking into account the efficiency of the electricity production, that number plummets. Also keep in mind: about 50% of the United States' electricity is made in coal-fired plants. This Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] states:

Average share of electricity generated from coal in the US has dropped slightly, from 52.8% in 1997 to 49.0% in 2006. However, due to growth of the total demand for electricity, the net production of coal-generated electricity increased over the same period from 1.845 to 1.991 trillion kilowatt-hours per year in absolute terms.

You probably meant kilotons here. Though even Saturn V didn't use as much as three kilotons of fuel per launch.

Seriously, the amount of fuel required for a rocket launch, even a very large rocket launch, isn't all that much. Remember that the USS Iowa carried 2.1 million gallons of fuel, which translates to about seven kilotons of fuel, no more than a month's supply.

Can we afford such massive expenditures of energy on such a frequent basis? And for how long? Is this limitless or what? I mean, I love sci-fi too but unfortunately have become aware of the fact that resources are not limitless....

Have you ever seen how much fuel is required for an Abrams Tank? I think if we are worried about energy expenditure we should scale back our military operations before scientific endeavors.

I recall reading that an Abrams Tank gets 1 mile/gallon and has a 60 gallon tank.

But then reading a bit into it, I'm wrong [globalsecurity.org]. (I'm probably thinking of a different tank.) The M1 Abrams gets 0.6 miles/gallon and has a fuel capacity of either 498 gallons or 505 gallons.

I think the 60 gallon figure comes from the speed of the supply line. Somebody just divided out the amount we could advance per day in Iraq by the rated mileage and got a sixty gallon tank. Even in Iraq, which is flat and has good roads, armored columns would start to outrun supply lines if they traveled more than about 60 miles per day.

In actual field experience, the M-1 gets about three gallons per mile, or about half its rated mileage.

The space program has given us. world wide telecommunications, GPS, weather satellite. How many lives and how much energy have those things saved? GPS alone applied to the transport industry has been a huge fuel saver.

"If" we develop fusion we will need fuel. Where is the highest concentration of fusion fuel? The moon.

Would it not be more ecological to mine asteroids than the amazon?

What about the development of clean 24/7 solar power? That can only be achieved in space.

The Moon program of the 60's gave us the transistor and ultimately the processor in your computer you used to view this. How many lives have been saved by the chip. Hybrid cars would be impossible with them.

The space program is possible the last area where mega projects can have significant positive impact on the planet, man and our future.

And lastly the resources in space are LIMITLESS. Once we learn how to tap them properly.

oxygen is abundant. It's a byproduct of the fusion process in stars. It's usually found in oxides and can be found in large quantities there. If you have solar power available in quantity, you can break down the water or silicates or metal oxides to produce the raw metals and all the oxygen you could need.

As for oil, use methane instead. There are whole planets of the stuff out there.

I think the bigger issue for fuel is going to be oxidizers. For your typical H2/O2 rocket, the O2 represents 89% of the fuel mass. And finding free oxygen in space is going to be almost impossible. Sure, you can probably find it bound up in ores/etc, but it takes a LOT of energy to separate it back out (more than you'd get back by burning it, of course).

I think that combustion isn't a very practical source of energy in space

I agree on combustion for spaceflight. We have technologies that are better suited there. but, when trying to get off of the surface, the booster phase, combustion may remain the safest method for the foreseeable future. Until, as you point out, we've solved the energy problem and have a form of fusion reactor that we can wedge into a spacecraft structure.

Free oxygen is damn near impossible to find. Anywhere. If plants weren't constantly replenishing the supply on Earth there would be none here eithe

Methane? Well what type of lubricants are we going to get from a gas? You may be accidently considering abiotic origins or petroleum, but unfortunately "there is no indication that an application of the hypothesis is or has ever been of commercial value."

No. I'm referring to the gas that's available in quantity. You need oil, think like a chemist and reform the methane into longer chain molecules.

The space program has given us. world wide telecommunications, GPS, weather satellite. How many lives and how much energy have those things saved? GPS alone applied to the transport industry has been a huge fuel saver.

Those are tremendous advances and there are many more besides. Problem is that the users of them often had nothing to do with the funding of them. That linking of the technology and the funding needs to happen for entrepreneurial activity to take place. To date the tremendous costs have made it very difficult for most entrepreneurs and businesses to directly pursue projects in space. (indirect opportunities such as building satellite parts or commercializing research are of course possible) Direct entr

At no point did I say cheap. I said heavy lifters are cheaper. When you talking about millions of dollars cheaper is far better.

Also if you don't learn how to utilize the resources out in space you ain't doing any exploration. Cause it's going to cost ridiculous amounts of money to get those resources into space if you don't use the resources up there.

if it was as cheap and rosy as you pretend it is, why does it cost hundreds of dollars per kg launched into orbit?

Hundreds of dollars per kg would be pretty sweet. You could put a bunch of people (bulk rate here) in orbit for less than a million dollars apiece at those rates. Unfortunately, current launch costs are somewhere between $5k and $40k per kg depending what you use (Russian vehicles for the lower cost, Shuttle for the higher cost) and how often you use them.

Lets say a big launch can throw 10000kg into the orbit of the ISS. To do that you need a big launcher and if it fails you lose the whole thing. A small launcher throws 1000kg into the same orbit. Assuming a zero failure rate one big launch should be cheaper than ten small launches.

But you can get better, faster at the small launches, because you might be doing one a week. Now thats a nice pattern if you think about it. You could stack the vehicle on Monday, roll it to the pad on Tuesday, test the payload on

Not only just the launcher, but some expensive payload. I mean, just think if the entire ISS was lost in one disaster. If you lose a module, yeah, its a setback but not a huge one. If you lose an entire space station though, chances are that space station plan will never get off the ground.

Well, actually, taking all sentimentality aside, there are a lot of people who would want to be an astronaut. But the sheer lack of missions mean that very few can actually make it. I mean, there has only been less than 600 astronauts from all the countries in the world. And there are a lot more people who would want to be an astronaut and others who are qualified to be an astronaut but instead do something different (such as fly a fighter jet)

Well it's not to lift a space station in one go. That's just stupid. First off you would have to build it in one impossible strong piece. The current system of lifting smallish pieces and assembling them in space will continue.

It's to lift FUEL.

A large lifter has to have 1 complete set of instruments. ( Plus it's redundancy ). A small lifter has to have EXACTLY THE SAME instruments. Thus the efficiency of the lifter drops and the expense per lift increase

If the vehicle is reusable, you do not have that many parts to test. If you have more than one launch vehicle design, you can stop some from flying while the others are being debugged. Same thing as with cars or airplanes.

"If there were weekly launches of a rocket, there would be many * DOLLARS * for new ideas to be tried out..."

Nope, sorry, it'll never get off the ground Orville.

These things cost money. Frequently too much, but even the best deals cost. Launching rockets costs a lot. It does not generate money. You can't buy squat with "opportunities", and can buy far less of you're punching holes in the sky based on a schedule of launches instead of a schedule of available payloads.

Exactly how is a score of 2, 1 for the post and 1 for an earned karma bonus, over rated?

Just some dipshit that'd rather see all Facebook and games articles modding down everything else without cause or a rational relation to mod points, I suppose.